Since the beginning of 2012, UFC welterweight Matt Brown has won six consecutive fights, all but one by KO/TKO within the first two rounds. His most recent was a startlingly fast and violent knockout of the previously red-hot Mike Pyle in under thirty seconds this past Saturday at UFC Fight Night 26.

All of a sudden, Brown is more than a tough and exciting fighter — he’s the owner of the most impressive win streak in the division outside of Georges St. Pierre and Johny Hendricks, who meet one another with GSP’s title on the line in November.

Brown has been calling out the champion and, well, now it makes sense. CagePotato spoke with the contender Sunday while he celebrated with family far away from the lights that shone on him kindly in Boston during his latest victory.

“It’s weird, man,” Brown muses while sitting with kids playing and shouting around him. “Obviously, I’m real happy with the result but I do feel a little unfulfilled. It wasn’t the type of fight I prepared for at all. But you take what you can get, right?”

On paper, UFC Fight Night 26 – or UFC on Fox Sports 1 1, or UFC Fight Night: Sonnen vs. Shogun, or whatever else people were calling this card – looked to be one of the strongest of the year. Usually those cards tend to be solid, but still fall a little short of the hype. This wasn’t one of those cards. All but one or two fights delivered in some form, often with jarring, violent finishes. It was all the UFC could have hoped for to cap off its run on Fox Sports’ new network.

Let’s start at the top; Chael Sonnen managed to control Mauricio “Shogun” Rua for the majority of the first round before shocking everyone by finishing Shogun with a guillotine choke. For Sonnen, this was a big win; it legitimizes his jump to 205, and he managed to submit an opponent with very high level submission grappling ability. It also netted him an extra $50,000 for one of the UFC’s Submission of the Night bonuses. Now everyone from Lyoto Machida to Vitor Belfort is chomping at the bit to get a shot at him. He’ll probably move on to fight either one of them, or Wanderlei Silva in a gimme matchup. As for Shogun, he was eulogized elsewhere before the fight. The hard truth is he hasn’t been the fighter he was since his third knee surgery after the second Machida fight, and getting hammered by Jon Jones and Dan Henderson probably didn’t help matters. Getting finished by Sonnen in the first round is evidence of that. It’s not quite time to hang up the gloves, but that day is drawing ever nearer for the 31 year-old.

On a slightly more enjoyable note was the shocking ending to the Travis Browne-Alistair Overeem co-main event. Overeem held the edge in power and technique, and it showed from the beginning. Overeem hammered Browne with shots from all angles, but particularly knees to the midsection. Browne was dropped a number of times but was never out of it, always maintaining an intelligent, if not necessarily effective, defense. But Overeem, as he is wont to do, began to tire. As he plodded forward, Browne unleashed a front kick that, while lacking the snap found in Anderson Silva’s or Lyoto Machida’s, was still sufficient to drop Ubereem. Browne followed with hammerfists and Mario Yamasaki stepped in. It was slightly premature, though Overeem had no complaints.

Handling the main card play-by-play for the UFC’s return to Boston is our man Oliver Chan (aka “O Chan”), who will be hand-delivering “UFC Fight Night: Shogun vs. Sonnen” live results after the jump beginning at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT. Refresh the page every few minutes for all the latest, and keep the conversation poppin’ in the comments section. Thanks for being here.

Featuring a lot of dudes with incredibly similar names, the weigh-ins for tomorrow’s UFC Fight Night: Shogun vs. Sonnen are going down from the TD Garden like five minutes ago, but luckily, CagePotato tech specialist George Maharis has hijacked the weigh-in stream and will now be broadcasting it exclusively through us, so get in here to check out all the results.

With a UFC event scheduled for this weekend that’s actually worth watching, it’s time for another installment of Ben vs. Jared, in which CagePotato’s founding editor Ben Goldstein and long-suffering staff writer Jared Jones go cabeza-a-cabeza to discuss some of this card’s major themes. For example: Is Shogun vs. Sonnen the most pointless match on the UFC Fight Night 26 main card? Is it safe to board the Matt Brown hype train? Will Joe Lauzon make history again? And is it Yuri or Iuri? Prepare for serious business…

BG: I think Shogun’s career is at stake, for one thing. If he loses to a one-dimensional middleweight (no offense, Chael), it’ll drop his UFC win percentage below .500, and bump him out of the UFC light-heavyweight contender picture, maybe permanently. He’ll enter that twilight stage of his career where he’s just showing up for “fun fights,” still famous enough to headline smaller UFC events in Brazil, but no longer part of the overall conversation. Or, he can just retire and run a gas station like his brother. Neither scenario is ideal, but the one that doesn’t require him to sustain traumatic brain injuries seems a little healthier.

JJ: Fuuuuuuck no. “Out of the light heavyweight picture?” Shogun has been out of the light-heavyweight picture since the current champion put him out of the light heavyweight picture at UFC 128, and I say that as a Shogun fan. The fact is, Shogun can’t stay healthy, he can’t put a win streak together, and his BADBOY tights are getting more constrictive by the day. Training with Freddie Roach may prolong Rua’s career a year or two longer than he would have lasted without it, but Shogun has got to be about the oldest 31-year-old in MMA. He was just used as a stepping stone for Alexander Gustafsson (unless you honestly thought the UFC was setting him up to be slaughtered by Jones again), so as far as I’m concerned, he IS in the “fun fights” part of his career. Again, Shogun fan talking here.

From an competitive standpoint, I’d call that a fair trade. Matt Brown is on a five-fight win streak with all but one of those wins coming by KO/TKO, and Pyle has been victorious in his last four (with three of those wins via KO/TKO), and is coming off a split-decision win against Rick Story at UFC 160. Both fighters havegriped about not getting enough respect from fans and media despite their recent success, so this is a perfect opportunity to see who really deserves it.

This is a very interesting fight to book. Not only because it features two of the welterweight division’s best strikers, but also because their careers appear to be heading in total opposite directions.

Matt Brown heads into this fight riding one of the most unexpected career comebacks in the sport. Just two years ago, Brown was a 12-11 “Why hasn’t he been fired yet?” gatekeeper who appeared to lack anything resembling submission defense. Five fights later, Brown is now 17-11, with four of those fights ending by knockout. During this stretch he has notably exposed Stephen Thompson’s takedown defense, ended Mike Swick’s bid for 2012′s Comeback of the Year, and most recently deflated the hype of Strikeforce standout Jordan Mein at UFC on Fox 7. While many fans still question Brown’s submission defense, let’s be honest, this fight likely won’t provide any answers as to how far that has progressed.

-With eight (T)KO’s, UFC on FOX 7 tied UFC 92 for the most (T)KO finishes in a single UFC event in the promotion’s history.

-In defeating Jordan Mein via second round TKO, the resurgent Matt Brown now holds the third longest win streak (5) amongst active UFC welterweights, as well as the record for (T)KO finishes in the welterweight division. Yet incredibly, the FOTN check Brown received was the first end of the night bonus he has earned in some 15 UFC fights.

-Frank Mir, like, really dropped the ball against Daniel Cormier.

Now, using those absolute truths and a little speculation, let’s decide who the biggest winners and losers from UFC on FOX 7 should face next, shall we?

The Winners

Ben Henderson: Well, we already know who he’ll be facing next, so that one is pretty easy. The question now becomes: How do you see Bendo taking it? Split decision, unanimous decision, or the always rare majority decision?

Since we can only post so many “U Mad?” GIFs in one day, this will have to suffice.

The UFC paid out a total of $1,518,000 in disclosed salaries and end of the night bonuses to the fighters on last night’s UFC on Fox 7, according to the California State Athletic Commission. Both former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir and current UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson took home $200,000 for their performances last night, making them the two highest paid fighters on the card. Former Strikeforce lightweight champion Gilbert Melendez took home the evening’s third-highest disclosed salary at $175,000.

The entire disclosed payroll is below, via MMA Junkie. Keep in mind that the following figures account for neither sponsorships and undisclosed “locker room bonuses,” nor do they include deductions for taxes, insurance, and licensing fees. Also, since there were no submissions on the card, two fighters took home a Knockout of the Night bonus.

UFC on Fox 7 was a violent and almost uniformly fought at a furious pace over the course of twelve preliminary and main card bouts. Eight bouts finished inside of the distance, and the main event was five close-fought, damaging rounds long.

Welterweights Matt Brown and Jordan Mein each got extra $50,000 bonus checks for putting on the fight of the night and Josh Thomson and Yoel Romero each got knockout of the night awards and 50k bonuses.

Thomson returned to the UFC in style by handing Nate Diaz his first ever stoppage loss – a second round TKO stoppage. Romero caught Clifford Starks with a flying knee and won a quick via quick TKO.

Neither Daniel Cormier nor Frank Mir won extra bonuses for their three-round heavyweight bout. Cormier did continue to show that he is a legitimate contender in the division, on the strength of his world-class wrestling skills and speed, despite being vastly undersized.

As they took the center of the Octagon, the smaller Cormier looked like he was facing his uncle in the large former two-time heavyweight champ Mir. Once Cormier got a hold of Mir, over and over again throughout the fight, it was the two-time Olympic wrestler that looked like a man fighting a child.

Cormier clinched with Mir, pressed him against the cage, let go and, on separation, unloaded nasty hooks and uppercuts to the head and body of Mir, along with elbows and knees before clinching back up and rinsing and repeating. As the fight wore on and Mir proved helpless against Cormier’s strategy, referee Herb Dean didn’t like Cormier’s dominance so he tried, as all refs disturbingly seem to be instructed to do, to give Mir more of a chance by breaking up the clinch work quickly but that couldn’t stop the wrestler from continuing to close the distance.

Mir would not be mentally broken despite eating big shots and being ground down, and he fought hard in the third round – throwing hard punches and knees. The ones that did connect, however, were absorbed by Cormier, and he just went back to pressing Mir against the cage and doing short striking work at will.

Cormier fought the smartest fight he could against a much larger, more experienced opponent. The cerebral fighter knew that the middle was his friend. Had he stayed out on the outside, Mir might have used his far superior reach to land big shots.

Had Cormier taken Mir down (he did so once, with a single leg, but did not follow Mir to the ground. Choosing instead, to let the Jiu Jitsu master stand up and eat an over hand right), he would have let the black belt do work where he was most comfortable and dangerous. So, Cormier did what he should have – control the clinch and then use his superior speed to land at will on separation.

I don’t know how long this lightweight/welterweight-heighted phenom will continue to be successful at heavyweight, but so far he can count two former UFC heavyweight champs as wins, as well as the #1 contender to the belt right now, Antonio Silva. It has been fun to watch Cormier figure out how to win fights at heavyweight.